Growing up under apartheid in the 1970s, I think that I knew my place from an early age. This is not merely a metaphorical knowing of my place and keeping quiet when I had something to say; by nine years old, I knew that I was a second class citizen. No-one had ever told me this, but I suppose nine years of living in South Africa under apartheid was bound to imprint some message of racial disharmony in my impressionable head.
I remember being nine years old – or I think I was nine years old – and going to Blue Route Shopping Mall in Tokai with my parents and my five year old sister. It was very likely a Wednesday because my father worked half days on Wednesdays and then we would go grocery shopping. Back then shopping malls often had play areas where parents could leave their children while they shopped. I don’t remember these play spaces having attendants, but maybe they did. What I remember quite clearly on this day, was that my sister and I were wearing matching soft cotton dresses with a green paisley-like pattern and flowers. I was also wearing my school shoes and socks with my dress.
My parents left us at the big plastic playground with the slide and the jungle-gym. There were two other girls there. White girls with blonde hair. They were barefooted. I remember noticing this and wondering about it.
Weren’t white people better than us? Weren’t white people better off than us? Is it because they are originally from Europe that the cold in Africa does not affect them as much as it does people from Africa, that they can walk around barefooted on cold days? Or is it because they’re better than us so they don’t have to worry about wearing shoes in a shopping mall, they don’t have to prove their worth? They don’t have to prove that they know about shoes? Being nine years old, these were more feelings than articulated thoughts.
The older of the two white girls was friendly and we ended up playing with them. I think we were about the same age. I remember feeling confused that they would want to play with us because I thought we were not allowed to be together, black people and white people. But then I thought that maybe it was alright because the white girl had initiated the contact, not me, and if contact was initiated by white people then it would be okay. I remember feeling that I had to follow the white girl’s lead and then everything would be okay. I thought that I had to defer to her.
I also thought I could observe what it meant to be white and that I could work out how they were different from me. All that I could ascertain, however, was that white people didn’t care about wearing shoes like black people did and that they seemed to be more confident, or less self-conscious about what they were doing.
Through most of this interaction, unfortunately, I was deeply in my head and unable to enjoy this unusual instance of southern suburbs inter-racial interaction.
A slightly different version of this memory was submitted to the Apartheid Archive.
attention to detail 
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27 July 2009 at 4:46 pm
Joe kelly
Thanks. I enjoyed reading this. Just goes to show how varying our experiences of apartheid have been. Except for school or Mass, I was always barefooted in the seventies. On the rare occasion that I had encounters with white kids, I didn’t take notice of their feet. They always appeared dazzling and beautiful against my shabbiness and ugliness.
27 July 2009 at 7:29 pm
TLS
White people were supposed to have had shoes because, well, because they were white. In my nine year old head white people had all the good things, and they had all things that proved their worthiness as these special people. So, if they weren’t wearing shoes, it wasn’t because they didn’t have any, it was because they didn’t want to wear them and they had nothing to prove by wearing them.
I have a sense that for black people, if they had them, wearing shoes was part of being proper and showing that they were almost as good as white people. So, it was important to wear shoes in public places where you would be judged on your properness, e.g. at Mass and at school.
30 July 2009 at 3:13 am
Joe kelly
Yeah, I get it now. Your point is that white people, because of privilege, could be fully themselves or feel quite exalted within themselves without shoes because a sense of freedom was their definitive mode of being under apartheid. I suppose this also relates to public nudity, which white South Africans took to with relish when they were first allowed to set up naturist camps and topless beaches in the 1970s or 1980s. They thrived in the enjoyment of this newfangled freedom while continuing to look with upturned noses against the traditions of bareness in African people, who had never been restricted by Victorian norms in the first place. In this new guise, white nakedness is sexualised, while black nakedness is perceived as unsightly primitiveness. The sexualised body (barring the crass commercialism and sexism involved) is a body of freedom, fresh air, and cooling waters. The dark naked body, by contrast, is the very essence of the torture and scorching fires of the hell that religion promises us as the very nemesis of all human sexuality. Tanned white bodies, of course, signal white freedom to play with damning fire in way that revilitalises the sense of pleasure in one’s sexual being with just faint tarnish of the darkness that black bodies permanently retain. Same with shoeless feet, a white child’s feet apppear to have easily removeable stains of play, while a black child’s simply appears dirty.